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Wednesday, August 15, 2012

Recruit a Friend, Pandas, and Monks oh my!

Recent Activision-Blizzard announced that recruit a friend would work with Pandas and the Scroll of Resurrection bonuses would not.

Now I have very mixed feelings about the whole thing but I do love poking at things to learn more so I took on learning about RAF's ins and outs to pass it on to you so when the day comes you can be an instant 80 if you desire. I'll be covering all I learned but if that bores you just skip down to the part 'What this all means'.

And now on with the show!

First thing to consider is that you will be forced to finish the starting area if you play a panda like the Goblin and the Worgen. Fighting the tide will be difficult so a Pandaren is almost certain to not end up your first 90 Monk.

The basics of RaF
1) Every 2 levels the RAF account earns gives you 1 level you can gran to a lower level character on the main account.
2) You dont get gear or abilities set up so your gear will end up less like this...

More like this.

(So make sure you have your cata 80 leather greens all set aside or life will suck even more as you try to work out your buttons).

There are more things that can be worked out about the system. Levels are not faction specific. I leveled an Alliance priest to 6, then hopped on a horde priest and got to 4. I was able to spend 3 levels to boost the main account to level 4 even though the RAF only earned 2 horde side.

I also repeated the experiment but after deleting the Alliance character. It looks like levels remain even after you got rid of the character that created them but with as spaghetti as WoW's code is I wouldn't gamble on it myself.

Leveling alts with RAF is insanely fast for the first few levels, slowing down a bit as you rise up.

Free accounts you RAF can still grant levels up to level 20.

What this all means.
The 'Best' strategy for one faction would be to take a character and grind to 80. Make a DK grind it to 80. That gives you roughly 62 levels. To get your 80 level 4 level 10 characters fro 20 more levels.

For 2 factions make your 80 a horde, your DK an alliance. You can have 50 characters on your account so with 16 more at 10 you can get 80 more levels with almost no effort at all.

Even if your not working your way to 80 make a FREE account to 'store' levels to boost from 10-20 once your level 10.

A pair of Hunters is the easiest. Followed by Priests and an Ele Shamanan/Mage combo in my experience.

I'm still sort of rooting for Blizzard to remove the RAF feature from Monks. One other thing to consider is what racials you desire.